What happens
now is that we (by which I mean the West) eradicate state-sponsored
terrorism. And we can achieve that only by replacing all political systems
that perpetrate or collaborate with terrorism, by systems that respect
human rights both domestically and internationally.

This will require, first of all, war. Then, it will require spectacular
success at the notoriously difficult task of improving other nations'
political systems. But we have done such things before: we did it for
Germany and Japan in 1945. We have also failed many times at it. We
must succeed this time.

But more:
it will require changes in us. In our conception of the political landscape.
It will take violations of old taboos and the creation of new understanding
and new traditions. Genuinely this time, it will require the creation
of a new and better world order. At a moment like this, people like
those gathered here  Edge contributors  surely have
a great deal to offer.

I haven't
read all the contributions. I agreed with much of what I read, disagreed
with some. But I found little of what I had hoped for.

Richard
Dawkins, as usual, talked sense, and made several true and timely points.
He praised America as "the principal inheritor, and today's leading
exponent, of European scientific and rational civilisation", and he
broke a taboo by pointing out that this is "the highest civilisation
ever". He took sides: "I want to stand up as a friend of America" 
as do I. But in one important respect, his remarks did not seem to me
to reach the heart of the issue. He blames religion, and our convention
of "respecting" it. Now, I am no advocate of religion, but religious
belief is surely not central to the present disaster. There are plenty
of terrorists at large who are not pursuing any religious agenda. There
are notorious sponsors of terrorism who are driven by nationalist or
socialist ideologies, not religious dogma. And there are plenty of religious
zealots who are no danger to anybody (except themselves and their unfortunate
wives and children).

That is
not to deny that mainstream Islamic culture has exhibited a major moral
failure. It seems to struggle even to find the language and the conceptual
framework genuinely to oppose the crimes that are committed in its name.
Large numbers of peaceful Muslims find themselves in effect condoning
mass murder, and painfully few can bring themselves to side with the
victims now exercising their right of self defence. Nevertheless it
is not the tenets of Islam that have caused the present violence. This
is a political evil we are facing, not a religious one. And it is a
modern evil, not an ancient one.

Moreover,
mainstream Western culture has also exhibited a major moral failure:
a refusal to distinguish between right and wrong. The unique glories
of our civilisation  self-criticism, tolerance, openness to change
and to ideas from other cultures  have in many people's minds
decayed, under this moral failure, into self-hatred, appeasement, and
moral relativism.

For instance, Freeman Dyson begins his contribution by attributing the
First World War to an excess of zeal in fighting terrorism. His "What
Now?" is that we must "stop telling the rest of the world how to behave"
and instead "learn to live with the world as it is, not as we want it
to be". He also describes his youthful sympathies with the Nazi bombers
who in 1940 were dropping death on London, the "citadel of oppression"
in which he lived. Of the recent suicide attacks he says: "I find it
easy to imagine the state of mind of the young men who so resolutely
smashed those planes into the buildings. Almost, I could have been one
of them myself". It is ironic that he shows so much empathy with the
pilots who murdered thousands in the cause of evil, and so little for
those who are at this moment risking their lives to destroy a genuine
citadel of oppression.

But this is no coincidence. Moral relativism always sees itself as evenhanded,
and indeed it begins with a retreat from judgement or taking sides.
But in practice it always entails siding with wrong against right. I
said that we need to change. Here is something that desperately needs
to change. A colleague wrote recently: "Despite the morality of responding
in self-defence to a terrorist attack, I am thinking about how to find
solutions that do not include tit for tat." Yet nothing that the West
has done so far, or has threatened to do, or has proposed to do, has
involved any hint of tit for tat. The idea that it does, is another
example of the moral relativism that has pervaded far too much of Western
thought and policy making, and is an integral part of what caused the
attacks. In reality, the impulse for revenge plays no significant role
in the political culture of the West. If it did, then the vast, peaceful,
humane and diverse civilisation of the West itself would not be possible.

It is
not true that the recent attacks on the US were motivated by a state
of mind similar to that which is currently motivating the Western response.
The Western stance  and even Western mistakes, including appeasement
and moral relativism  are driven fundamentally by respect for
human beings, human choices and human life. Western values are life-affirming
and life-seeking. The murderers worship death. There is no symmetry
between life and death.

There
is no "cycle of violence" that we have to "break" by making the murderers
and their sympathisers feel less angry with us. Their anger is unjustified:
To cleanse the Arabian peninsula of non-Muslims is an immoral aim, violating
the human rights both of non-Muslim residents and of Muslims who wish
to associate with them (and, perhaps more pertinently, to seek their
assistance in defending themselves). To cleanse Israel of Jews is an
aspiration similar in kind but much more evil both in its racist motivation
and in its intention to destroy an entire nation. To replace secular
or less-than-fundamentalist governments by religious fundamentalist
ones in all Islamic countries is an utterly tyrannical agenda. And there
is a fourth unjustified 'grievance' that goes implicitly with those
three: they demand the right to punish the West, by mass murder, with
impunity, if anyone in the West opposes them in pursuing any of those
other 'grievances'.

In contrast,
the West's anger, and the West's restrained, careful and humane response
in self-defence, are justified. The problem is not to find alternatives
to defending ourselves against murderers. The exact opposite is true:
this violence will end if and only if we defend ourselves, effectively.
And effectiveness will depend in part on our saying truthfully what
we are doing, and why our stance is not essentially the same
as theirs.

You can
perceive our stance and theirs as symmetrical only by expunging morality
from your analysis: seeing all political objectives as being legitimate,
all rival value systems as matters of taste, treating murderers and
their victims with evenhanded sympathy. You have to look at tolerance
and its opposite, intolerance, and pretend that they are two versions
of the same thing. You have to pretend that the richness and diversity
and creativity of our civilisation are playing the same role in our
lives as empty repetition, oppression, and pitiless enforcement of a
monoculture play in theirs.

People
wring their hands and say that there must be "better ways of finding
solutions" than warfare. Of course there are. We have already found
them. The nations and people of the West use them all the time. They
are openness, tolerance, reason, respect for human rights  the
fundamental institutions of our civilisation. But no way of finding
solutions is so effective that it can work when it isn't being used.
And when a violent group defines itself by its comprehensive rejection
of all the values on which problem-solving and the peaceful resolution
of disputes depend, and embarks instead on a campaign of unlimited murder
and destruction, it is morally wrong as well as factually inaccurate
to represent this as a case of our needing "better ways of finding
solutions". That is why we have to insist, by force if necessary, that
everyone else in the world also respect, and enforce, the minimum standards
of civilisation and human rights. Western standards.

One last
thought. If I am right that there has been a moral failure in the West
despite  and in a way, because of  the moral superiority
of Western political culture over that of its enemies, then there is
also a second irony. One may argue about the precise role of religion
in the terrorists' mindset, but Mr Blair and Mr Bush, both of
them religious believers who purport to derive their moral stances from
their religions, are certainly not part of the problem: on the contrary,
they are leading the solution. Mr Bush, speaking to an audience of children,
addressed the question that everyone has asked: "Why would somebody
hate so badly"? And he replied: "my answer is, there's evil in the world.
But we can overcome evil. We're good." This is the simple truth 
a truth on which all our futures depend  yet the moment Mr Bush
uttered it, all the intellectuals in the Western world winced. Even
those who, like myself, agreed with the proposition, winced, vicariously,
because we recognised the intensity of the taboo that was being broken.

How many
non-believers would have been capable of giving the right answer to
that question? President Bush was able to answer it, and to articulate
the explanation, and to use it as an essential element of national policy,
not especially because he knows it intellectually but because he understands
it in his gut. And the process by which it got into his gut was intimately
connected with his religion. I must hasten to add that this process
also entrenched there a slew of wrong ideas. Nevertheless, civilisation
will survive the miscellaneous evils that one finds in a mature, Western
religion  such as Bush's opposition to abortion, and the like.
But it would not, pace Richard Dawkins, survive the typical non-believer's
(pre-September-11) take on the nature of morality. We non-believers
have failed too. What comes next is that we must correct that failure,
by incorporating into the Western tradition of critical rationalism
an objective conception of right and wrong.